SINCE I became aware of my own existence, I have never seen puff puff the size of a table tennis egg. But that’s the situation now in Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Nigeria, and I fear that some children will grow up assuming that this is the normal size of the popular snack. In the 80s when I accompanied my father, a businessman, on trips to Idumota, Lagos, we used to buy puff puff from some Ghanaians very early in the morning. We usually arrived Idumota from Ita Elewa, Ikorodu, before 6 a.m. Generously spiced with pepper and onions, the puff puff was roughly the size of a human wrist. That was unique, but the regular puff puff I grew up eating was just like buns, roughly the size of a lawn tennis ball. Now, things are so costly, and Nigerians are so wretched, that puff puff looks like an egg!
This week, the FG and labour reached a deal on a new minimum wage of N70,000. Now, from the front page of yesterday’s (Friday’s) edition of The Guardian, we learn that the value of Nigeria’s minimum wage was $88 in 2019, $79 in 2020, $63 in 2021, $67 in 2022, $65 in 2023, and $45 in 2024. As I write this on Friday, July 19, the dollar exchanged for N1,629.84, which means that the new minimum wage is a mere $42.9. As of 2022, Seychelles had the highest minimum gross monthly wage in Africa, at $464.76. It was followed by Morocco ($285.61) and South Africa ($248.12). I remember that when the minimum wage was N18,000 under President Goodluck Jonathan, a bag of rice cost between N6,000 and N7,500. If you were a minimum wage earner, you could buy two bags of rice from your pay and still have some change left. Tinubu’s new minimum wage can’t buy a bag of rice.
Yesterday, as I conversed with a neighbour who is a fufu seller, I saw a young “iron condem!” (scraps collector) guy begging for a piece of paki fufu, which is the snack left-over in the pot after fufu has been made. I could have sworn that the guy, like a ‘shoemaker’ who asked for some gari at our place recently, hadn’t had anything for breakfast. All over the land, the raw flesh of poverty, the kind depicted in Festus Iyayi’s Violence, confronts you like a grenade. Titus fish that costs N1500 looks like it was taken prematurely from the sea: the price of the normal size is N2500. A congo of oloyin beans costs over N5,000 at Orita Challenge market and when I joked that my fufu-seller acquaintance wasn’t cooking ewa alagbado (beans-maize porridge) anymore, she asked how she could when beans alone cost more than N5,000! Actually, a woman I spoke with recently volunteered the information that while she was on leave, she and her family ate special egusi soup (egusi mixed with ground pepper, ata gigun) throughout, as the cost of pepper had gone through the roof! I have spoken to many people who have not eaten yam for months!
It seems that roast Titus fish has disappeared from the markets, and I can’t blame the sellers. Time was in this country when, despite the poverty in the land, you could buy roast Titus to eat (drink) your gari, spicing things up with rodo pepper and salt. These days, no one is roasting the fish to sell, because people are struggling to buy even the fresh, unroasted ones. When I was a child I did know that anything like “Number 2” Titus; I knew only that delicious (best when roasted) Titus whose sellers normally sold a huge chunk of their wares ever before they got to the market. Today, in Tinubu’s kingdom, no trader has the temerity to roast her Titus for sale. Gradually, the things we used to take for granted are becoming luxuries. By the way, are there still families (minus those in the political class) that eat their ogi or akamu with Peak milk? I see different kinds of afflictions passing for milk these days, and I am left completely stupefied.
Markets treat our salaries in a very shabby manner, and devilish traders are making a killing. This week, the Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Ogunwusi, had to hand down a ban to market groups fleecing consumers in the kingdom. A video of the leader of market heads in Ile-Ife, Akinwande Olajire, quickly went viral. Hear him:“Baba Ooni and his chiefs have been told of unjustifiable amount traders are selling food items in markets in the town and one of the measures to check this is the ban he placed on market groups. These groups are fixing prices for their members and we don’t want that. Traders should be free to sell at cheap rate, if they are able to buy at cheap rate from farms. The groups have been banned.” This week in Ilorin, Kwara State, shylock traders ganged up against their fellow colleague selling gari at N850, accusing her of “spoiling market” for them. They are just like the frauds who add the light, topmost part of palm oil to their ororo (vegetable oil) to make it look imported!
If you eat scotch egg/egg buns, beware. I’m told certain evil women now use bad turkey eggs in place of the normal eggs, dishing out disease to unsuspecting customers. Almost in all cases, a congo of anything (rice, beans, etc) in the market is just going to give you about eight cups, which is why you have to go there with a trusted congo or insist on your foodstuff being measured in five-cup packages.
“The town is hungry,” a woman said repeatedly in the Ilorin market video. I say that wretchedness has taken over this land! That is why the initial title of this piece was: Nigeria: A time of wretchedness. Sadly, our leaders are lost in their lust, busy buying jets and setting up a federal body to conduct local government elections. As King Sunny Ade once sang: Eedi re o, ogun esu ni! (This is confusion, a war waged by the devil!).
Nigeria don cast o!
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